ACADEMIC PAINTERS - DOMINANCE AND DECLINE

Fashions in Art are as volatile as fashions in Clothes. For at least 2 centuries the Academies in, for example, France and Britain set themselves up as the arbiters of taste and the promulgators of artistic rules.  At times, the Academies held sway and academicians produced highly polished, if not often inspirational, paintings. But the artistic community is not easily biddable, revolt against prescribed rules is inevitable and a huge variety of original images and themes bubble up for our dismay or enchantment. The academicians came to be derided but their solid achievements deserve due praise. My piece will concentrate on Britain, with only tangential reference elsewhere.

Portraits of the Academicians by Johan Zoffany

The Royal Academy was founded in London in 1768, many years behind institutions in Italy and the French Academy established by Louis XIV in 1648.  The ever-disputatious French soon got into a controversy on the merits of the line of Poussin as against the colour of Rubens but London was less dogmatic. The Royal Academy elected urbane Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first President.  Reynolds was an undisputed artistic leader, even though his sometimes slapdash technique earned him the nick-name “Sir Sploshua”, and he was much admired in the higher reaches of society.

Lady Charles Spencer by Reynolds

      

Reynolds decreed that the Academy follow “The Grand Manner”, the renewal of the works of the Old Masters, concentrating on mythological, classical or historical subjects, but including portraits and the naked female form. There were many exhibitions, as much social as artistic occasions.  In Paris there were controversies between the disciples of David, Ingres and Delacroix but easy-going London tolerated the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Millais indeed morphed into an RA President).

There was a heyday of Academic painting in 19^th century Britain. The great names were Sir Lawrence Alma- Tadema and Frederic, Lord Leighton.

Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna by Frederic, Lord Leighton (1855)

The Roses of Heliogabalus by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888)

These paintings were accomplished and architecturally accurate with a polished sheen. The Victorian public loved them and the academicians became rich. They were however over-fond of the nude (Her Majesty herself, George Eliot or Florence Nightingale failing to satisfy their gaping erotic appetites!) and later generations accused these artists of “lubricity”.

Cave in the Storm by Sir Edward Poynter

The Birth of Venus by W-A Bouguereau

The Sirens and Ulysses by William Etty

These quasi-erotic themes were exemplified by the kind of paintings above, mirrored by Bouguereau’s French confection, acceptable to Gallic susceptibilities in a way that Manet’s shameless Olympia never could be.

The reputation of these Victorian academicians sharply nose-dived by the 1920s, but bounced back. An Alma-Tadema painting The Finding of Moses, originally sold in 1904 for £5,250. In 1960 it was “bought in” for £252 when it failed to reach its reserve in auction. This same painting was auctioned in 1995 for £1.75m and in 2010 auctioned in New York for a Victorian painting record of $35.9m (sic!). Leighton is also a darling of the sale-room and his splendid Oriental-tiled mansion in Holland Park, Leighton House, is one of the hidden treasures of London.

The Scots painter Sir William Russell Flint (1880-1969), with scant regard for fashion, continued the Academic ethos with his well-draughted evocations of Spanish gypsy girls and females in advanced states of undress. Perhaps he knew that his Scottish public, frozen to the vitals by the desolate North Sea haar, needed to fantasize and dream of warmer pleasures. In truth Flint teeters away from the Academy towards the values of Playboy magazine.

The Silver Mirror by Sir William Russell Flint

The Academies have thus delivered a mixed legacy. They have provided conventional pleasures in an accessible form, surely preferable to the many-papped or three-eyed monstrosities served up by the grotesquely over-praised Modernists.

It may be instructive to evoke another artist, Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) who was at least a half-academician. He received his professional training at the highly conservative Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, the equivalent of an Academy. He worked on conventional murals and ceilings. He fell foul of the authorities, rather in the academician fashion, by decorating the Great Hall of the University of Vienna with ceiling paintings criticised as “pornographic”. Klimt founded the Vienna Secession movement and moved towards Symbolism. Yet Klimt knew his public and his line and vibrant colours were in the Academic tradition. In a so-called Golden Phase, Klimt painted his Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer in 1907. To global astonishment it was bought for an astounding $135m in 2006 by the Neue Galerie, New York, the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt

Those Academicians always had an unerring instinct for the soft-spots of public taste – not for them starving in a garret – and they prospered mightily.

SMD

24.05.16

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016.